I have gradually come to the conclusion that no group that asserts that it wants to “Get the money out of politics” can be trusted. All the ones I have kept track of for any length of time proved in the end to be people who thought that they had a way to shut down the opposition that they would be able to work around.

OK, so what the hell is so difficult about the cop calling before entering a property when there is no indication of immediate danger or a crime being committed?

“Hi, Ms. Gregory. Office Chase Calhoun. I’m here to take your report. Can you make sure that any animals are secure and kids are wearing pants? Meet me at the front gate to let me in. OK, you need a couple minutes to secure the dogs? No problem. I’ll wait here.”

Baltimore cops simply expanded existing laws to allow them to continue cracking down on camera-wielding citizens, including threatening to arrest a man for loitering.
On Monday, the Department of Justice slapped the Baltimore Police Department with another letter, condemning it for writing such a vague general order and for allowing the harassment to continue.
———-
The police seem to be caught in a PR death spiral. The more
they attempt to pretend to fight a perfectly legal activity, the
more attention it arouses, and the more idiotic they look.

#4 Yeah, they really mean get everyone else’s money money out of politics.

#5 You’re assuming cops actually respect citizen’s property. When you have a gun and a badge you can go wherever you please. I’ve come to the conclusion that if it is absolutely necessary to get the police involved and it’s possible, just go to the station.

#7 and #9: On the SoCal news, there was a story about the Postal Service doing dog bite awareness. While they don’t shoot dogs, they do sustain quite a few bites every year, some pretty serious.

In many cases where a dog gets shot or a dog bites someone, the underlying problem was approach protocol. That is very trainable and fixable for people, and does not have to add cost to the routine. Postal workers with regular routes are free to note that an address has a scary or vicious dog and make the owner get his mail at a Post Office. Great protocol! Prevents many negative interactions with animals. Police officers need to have similar options when dealing with non-emergency calls, both for their safety and for animals’ safety.

The marriage article isn’t interesting, it’s bizzare. So since the government has, in the past, coerced people into getting married against their will, it’s okay for them to coerce people into remaining unmarried today. That’s like arguing it’s okay to ban consensual sex because there’s a problem with rape.

On the gay marriage story, I’ve been saying for some time that we need a complete separation of marriage and state, not just some tinkering with the rules. Why should you need the state’s permission to enter into a voluntary agreement that you call a marriage? Here’s what I wrote about it last week:

Yes, if I was declared Libertarian emperor, I’d eliminate all government marriage, but the fact is right now we do have state sponsored marriage and many parts of our legal system grant special consideration to married couples that are not offered to other pairing of individuals.

As long as that remains the case, people have a right to expect equal treatment under the law.

To put it another way, I personally would like to see the income tax eliminated. But if I supported an 85% tax rate, I would still be supporting confiscatory taxes even if I justified it on the grounds of “Well, there should be no income tax at all so it doesn’t matter what the rate is”.

Got to love the couple who put this man through this living hell using “for the children” excuse. I expect this sick “tactic” to be used more if gay couples adopting children increases. The easiest way to ruin people is to accuse them of harming children in a sexual way. This couple has some nice karma coming their way.

There was a Law and Order: SVU episode on this (sort of). A family was in a car accident and one of the doctors discovered molest signs in the daughter which led to the police being notified. The police dug up something on the father that he was falsely accused of molesting students but even though the charge was a farce, the notion that he was accused caused him to lose his job and leave town. In the episode the father is a coach After local people heard about the daughter, all of a sudden random complaints about children being molested flooded the department. Which lead to the department trying to get the daughter to point out who did it via a drawing which somehow implicated the father. The family’s house was raided and the father was arrested. Later on it’s discovered that it was older jock boy at the school who actually did the molesting. The father was clear of all chargers but at the end of the episode he tells the detective that he has been fired from his new school job and might have to moved to a different town again.

The passion play does not bother me at all. Provided no one was coerced into participating or watching it. Most prisoners at Angola are probably Christian and if the play resonates with them, good for them.

I assume the prison drama department is not forced to only do Christian themes. Obviously that is important.

The cops should talk to the people at Terminix. They have a canned voicemail msg they send couple of days before they come over for the regular outside treatment. One of things they mention is to please secure your pets. I guess it’s too hard for cops to do the same things. Maybe while they enjoy their free donut and coffee? OK, back to reality now…

The State has a stake in this because, way back when we were just figuring out how to bang rocks together to make fire, the Clan had a very significant stake in it. Marriage has been tied up with Societal approval since societal approval was crucial because the unity of the clan was one of the few things standing between the individual and getting eaten by bears.

The notion that the State does NOT stand in loco parentis is very new (as in, no older than the 18th century Age of Reason) and fairly radical even today. And disentangling the custom of marriage from the warp and woof of British Common Law (and thus from our own legal heritage) is probably impossible.

What I tell the Religiously Offended who want me to denounce Gay Marriage is “What’s wrong with our marriage customs has little or nothing to do with Gays. The problem isn’t that we are considering allowing Gays to marry, The problem is that it is easier to get out of a marriage contract than it is to get out of a cell-phone contract.”

If cops are so afraid of dogs…from Jack Russels to Labradors, then maybe they are too scared to be trusted with being a cop.
Sending people who are scared while armed is never a good idea. Scared of furtive movement, scared of puppies, scared of unarmed people, scared of everything that goes bump in the night. It’s asking for tragedy.
Then don’t be a cop. You are not fit for duty. Craven sociopaths with a shoot first, my union will get me off attitude are a danger to society.
GOP Butt Plugs is the most amazing start to a headline ever.

I suspect most of us suspect that there’s more than incompetence
involved given the frequency of these gratuitous dog-killlings. Just
what is involved, I’m not sure.
I’m not positive it’s this:http://www.jihadwatch.org/2011/10/jihad-against-dogs.htm
but it’s certainly a candidate.
BTW, cruelty to animals *is* predictive of cruelty to humans.

About the Vallejo puppycide, it’s pretty stupid that we’ve created a bunch of makework projects for cops running errands for insurance companies. Investigating accidents or recording fraud victim statements would be done better, cheaper, and more safely by non-cops.

About the Vallejo puppycide, it’s pretty stupid that we’ve created a bunch of makework projects for cops running errands for insurance companies. Investigating accidents or recording fraud victim statements would be done better, cheaper, and more safely by non-cops.

About the Vallejo puppycide, it’s pretty stupid that we’ve created a bunch of makework projects for cops running errands for insurance companies. Investigating accidents or recording fraud victim statements would be done better, cheaper, and more safely by non-cops.

my last comment was needlessly flip. I withdraw it.

More serious response:

quite a few years ago I was walking to my work downtown early on a Saturday.

I walked up on a car accident. The damage to the vehicles was bad, but apparently nobody was hurt. There was an ambulance there and a firefighter. The cars were off to the side of the road and the people from the cars were standing around casually with the firefighters and the ambulance guys. I walked through the intersection on the other side of the street from where the cars and people were so as not to interfere or distract them. It was no big deal. I kept walking down the street.

A couple of minutes later, I am at the heart of downtown. there are few people out because it is early. This police car barrels through the main intersection toward the accident against a red light with no lights and sirens. The vehicle almost hit a pedestrian in the crosswalk. I thought maybe the police car was going to something more urgent than the accident scene. So i turned arond and watched to see where the police car was going in such a hurry. Yup, he was just speeding to the scene of the cleared, no-injury accident and he almost killed somebody doing it.

This was one of those moments that really change how I feel about police in general.

It is not a dramatic as Packratt’s story (thank goodness), but I was definitely like “what in the haitch ee double hockey sticks was that?”

Simple reason why the cop roared through the intersection to the almost cleared accident scene. Someone there, possibly both drivers, could be cited, and Officer Friendly could meet his quota, raise some revenue, and still have time to make it to Krispy Kreme. The pedestrian he almost hit was lucky he didn’t get a ticket for contempt of cop for daring to walk while Officer Friendly was in high pursuit of revenue.